people at home, and it would not do.

Then, just as he turned to refuge the woman who sat looking at him, the
curtains parted again and a face appeared. It was the face of a woman,
not of the world about him. It was some accident, some sinister,
unexampled happening, which had brought the face to the surroundings.
It gave to the wavering man a new idea of this world of shame and sin,
and it may have been the deciding ounce.




CHAPTER XVI.

THE REALLY UGLY DUCKLING.

He turned, to the woman across the table: "All right; I will stay."

I am but telling the story of a man of whose life from this time for
two years I know but little. He was always reticent about these years,
yet always said he had no occasion to regret them. With the life's
outlines, though, with what it really was, aside from details, I
became, in a degree, familiar.

What does the average person in one class know of the life in another?
There are "classes," certainly, with great bars between them here,
though this is a republic, and all men and women are supposed to be
free and equal and alike in most things. There are lower and wider
grades of existence, such that the story of them may never be told save
in patch-work or by inference, yet which have as full a history, and